Operator
Operator
Good morning and welcome to the Brown & Brown Incorporated Second Quarter Earnings Call. Today's call is being recorded. Please note that certain information discussed during this call, including information contained in the slide presentation posted in connection with this call, and including answers given in response to your questions may relate to future results and events, or otherwise be forward-looking in nature. Such statements reflect our current views with respect to future events, including those relating to the company's anticipated financial results for the second quarter of 2015, and are intended to fall within the Safe Harbor provisions of the securities laws. Actual results or events in the future are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, and may differ materially from those currently anticipated, or desired, or referenced in any forward-looking statements made as a result of a number of factors. Such factors include the company's determination as it finalizes its financial results for the second quarter of 2015 that its financial results differ from the current preliminary unaudited numbers set forth in the press release issued yesterday, other factors that the company may not have currently identified or quantified, and those risks and uncertainties identified from time to time in the company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Additional discussion of these and other factors affecting the company's business and prospects, as well as additional information regarding forward-looking statements is contained in the slide presentation posted in connection with this call and the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We disclaim any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. With that said, I will now turn the conference over to Powell Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer. You may begin. J. Powell Brown - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you, Tracy, and good morning everyone and thanks for joining us for our second quarter earnings call. I'm on slide four. We delivered $419.4 million of revenue for the quarter, growing 5.4% in total and 1.9% organically. Each of our four divisions delivered organic growth again this quarter. We continued to see overall economic conditions improve slowly, which is good, however, we, like the entire industry, continued to experience headwinds related to the rate declines. The downward pressure on rates continued to be driven by good overall loss experience, minimal weather related events and a significant amount of excess capital in the market chasing returns. We expect this trend to continue unless there is a material change in one or all of these factors. As we discussed on our previous calls, teammates are our most important asset and we're continuing to make the incremental investments in new revenue producing teammates. This is mainly for producers in Retail, but also includes brokers and Wholesale. These investments impacted our margin this quarter as compared to the second quarter of 2014. We're making these incremental investments as we see the economy continuing to improve, so we can build our team to capitalize on new opportunities. We recognize this approach has some short-term margin compression, but we expect these investments in new revenue producing teammates will deliver additional organic growth and margin expansion in the future. Our GAAP earnings per share were $0.43, growing 2.4% for the quarter. We're pleased to report that our board of directors has approved the purchasing of up to another $400 million of outstanding shares, which is part of our continued disciplined at capital allocation plan. We now have authorization to purchase up to $450 million of our shares with the remaining amount on the previous authorization. As I know everyone will ask, timing of any future share repurchases will be evaluated consistent with our approach to allocating capital to internal investments, acquisitions or returning it to shareholders. Also we've announced our quarterly dividend payment of $0.11 a share. Lastly, during the second quarter of 2015, we acquired four agencies with annual revenues of approximately $19 million. And for the year, we've acquired seven agencies with annualized revenues of approximately $31 million. While there are plenty of deals out there, we continue to see aggressive pricing for acquisitions, and we remain disciplined in what we pay. We believe we can continue to acquire good businesses, if they fit culturally and make sense financially. Slide five provides additional detail on some noteworthy items impacting the market. We continue to see slow economic improvement in some markets and certain areas in the country, but this is not consistent. We see exposure of unit growth in certain regions, but don't see consistent hiring across the board in the middle market. We believe this is partially driven by a lack of qualified – possibly of lack of qualified candidates, but more specifically the implications of ACA adoption that many employers are facing. We're experiencing further uptick in our private exchange offering during the quarter and now have over 4,000 covered lives, but adoption continues to be slow. We continue to see small and medium-sized employers evaluating public exchanges, technology and plan design alternatives in order to manage their healthcare and ancillary costs. Those may include partial self insurance and continuing to move to a per employee per month payment model in order to manage costs as they impalement the Affordable Care Act. Similar to what we've been seeing for a number of quarters, the favorable loss experience, the excess capital in the market and the prolonged period of limited weather events is driving most rates down. We continue to see declining rates for our coastal properties and also seeing admitted property rates trending flat, down 5% in some cases. However, we are seeing commercial auto rates generally trending up, but it really depends on the specific loss experience, and professional liability rates are flat to up 5%. Overall, weather events and the associated claims processing revenue to those events remain at very low levels and well below the 10-year average. Now, with that, let me turn it over to Andy, who'll discuss our financial performance in more detail. R. Andrew Watts - Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer & Executive VP: Great. Thank you, Powell, and good morning everyone. Let me first discuss our overall financial results and talk about some of the key metrics for the quarter. On slide six, it shows our consolidated results for the quarter. We delivered 5.4% revenue growth and grew organically in all four divisions with a total organic rate of 1.9%. We'll discuss the drivers of this growth by division later in the presentation. Our pre-tax income declined year-over-year by 90 basis points, driven by incremental investments in teammates and the additional interest expense associated with our credit facility and bonds. We'll be on a more comparative basis in the third quarter of this year as it pertains to year-on-year interest cost. We believe EBITDAC is the most appropriate measure for comparing our performance across periods. EBITDAC for the second quarter was $137.8 million compared to $134 million (sic) [$134.8 million] last year, an increase of 2.2%. Our EBITDAC margin decreased by 100 basis points, primarily as a result of our incremental investments in new teammates, which Powell described earlier. We expect margins to experience slight downward pressure year-over-year for the next few quarters due to these incremental investments. Then, as the new teammates begin to produce revenues, profitability will rise. We continue to seek EBITDAC margins in the range of 33% to 35% range over the long term. As we've mentioned before, at times, we might be below this range on a quarterly basis as a result of incremental investments. However, we do not believe a variance outside of this range for a few quarters will impact our margins expectations as we have built a very robust operating model. Our net income decreased by 1.3% in the quarter, which is slightly larger than that of the pre-tax income. This was a result of our effective tax rate increasing a 39.6% for the quarter versus 39.3% in second quarter of last year. The increase in our effective tax rate this year was primarily driven by the State of New York's new consolidated return approach and lower tax credits. At the mid-year point of the year, we're now expecting our overall effective tax rate to be in the range of 39.5% to 39.7% range for the full year. Our earnings per share grew 2.4% and our weighted average number of shares outstanding decreased by 2.2% year-over-year, driven by $175 million of share repurchases over the last 12 months. As a reminder, we initiated a $100 million accelerated share repurchase program during the first quarter of this year and it is now projected to be completed early in the third quarter. In the current environment, we continue to evaluate share purchases as a good use of our cash to drive shareholder returns. Moving to slide seven, I'd like to highlight the key components of our revenue performance for the quarter. Other revenues were down about $1 million year-over-year, driven by a gain on the sale of a book of business last year. This line item will fluctuate each quarter as it is not one that we can project. We did recognize just under a $1 million increase in continuous and guaranteed supplemental commissions, primarily from our Programs division. Both of these basically offset each other from a profitability standpoint. The largest driver of year-on-year growth of commissions and fees was from our net acquisitions, delivering $19.2 million of growth followed by organic growth of $7.4 million. Moving to slide eight, and transitioning from our global view of the company, we'd like to discuss each of our divisions in more detail. We'll start by looking at the Retail Division. Over the last three months, our Retail division has delivered 4% growth, primarily driven by acquisitions during the last 12 months. The organic revenue growth for the quarter is 70 basis points with a year-over-year EBITDAC margin decline of 110 basis points. Similar to the first quarter of this year, there are a number of key items impacting overall growth and profitability, which have continued into the second quarter. First, as we noted in our Q1 call, there has been a change in the State of Washington's regulation related to bona fide associations that resulted in several of our association health plans terminating as they were determined to be non-qualified. The change is continuing to impact our overall revenue growth by 60 basis points in the quarter, and margins by 30 basis points with a revenue loss of $1.2 million in the second quarter. As mentioned previously, we expect there to be about another $1 million revenue impact for each of the remaining quarters of the year and also to have an impact on our margins. Next, our small employee benefit space, which we define as the employers with less than 100 employees, we continue to see these companies to be very focused on managing their costs and trying to understand the implementation complexities of ACA. These factors have and are expected to continue to put downward pressure on our employee benefit revenues. Précising, our small employee benefits business represents about $90 million of total annualized revenues of our total employee benefits business of $250 million. For the quarter, our large employee benefits business grew nicely on an organic basis, while our small group declined. To address this downward pressure, over the past few quarters, we've been analyzing all the complexities of ACA and what our customers need. As a result, in addition to acquiring new employee benefit capabilities through our recent acquisition of strategic benefit advisors, we're also adding employee benefit resources to support our offices and continue to keep our teammates current on the ever-changing landscape related to regulation, compliance and technology. We're planning some modest investment in incremental resources in the second half of this year that will then help facilitate growth and margin expansion of our employee benefit business in 2016. Shifting to property rates, coastal or as we call them cat property renewal rates are continuing to decline 10% to 25% as compared to the second quarter of last year. Last year, we noted that they were down 15% to 20% as compared to 2013. We are seeing consistency with what we experienced in the first quarter of this year. Property renewal rates continue downward for admitted markets and are generally plus 5% to minus 5% versus the prior year. And lastly, we're seeing workers compensation renewal rates varying from plus 5% to minus 5%, depending upon claims history. Let me move to slide nine. Our National Programs revenues grew 10.3%, mainly due to the acquisition of Wright. We continue to see interest from carriers and capital allocators to leverage our underwriting capabilities, technology and broad distribution platform. We believe our expertise and capabilities will enable us to create new programs and help drive additional growth, as we are an ideal partner for a carrier, that wants to deploy capital, but does not want to build the infrastructure. We continue to experience good growth in Arrowhead aftermarket, our lender placed business, and our personal alliance businesses. A lot of this growth was offset by our coastal property facilities, which are experiencing intense downward rate pressure of 10% to 25%, and our California workers' compensation program is being impacted by a change in the risk appetite with our carrier partner. These two programs or businesses had slightly less than a 200 basis point impact on organic revenue growth for programs in the quarter. Lastly, the Programs division EBITDAC margins benefited from the disposal of ICG in the fourth quarter of last year, continued cost discipline management, and scaling our platform. Onto slide 10, our Wholesale division had another really good quarter, reporting revenue growth of 2% and organic growth of 5.1%. This differential is related to the sale of Axiom Re that we completed in the fourth quarter of last year. The binding authority and brokerage businesses, both contributed to the positive results for the quarter and we continue to see growth across most business lines. We are seeing more net new business and we're leveraging our deep carrier relationships to help provide innovative solutions for our customers. Even while facing major downward pressure on coastal property rates in the range of negative 10% to negative 25%, our brokerage business still grew nicely for the second quarter. This is a really impressive performance as it shows the amount of new business the team is writing and retaining each and every month. The Wholesale division delivered EBITDAC margin improvement of 40 basis points. The primary driver of this expansion is due to the sale of Axiom Re in the fourth quarter of last year. Onto slide 11 and our Services division, we delivered impressive organic growth of 7.8% for the quarter. This growth is driven primarily by our social security advocacy claims processing business, that added new clients and our Medicare set-aside processing business that expanded customer relationships. While we realized some revenues related to the recent flooding in the second quarter in Texas, the incremental claims processing revenue versus the prior year was immaterial for the quarter. Our EBITDAC margin declined by 190 basis points for the quarter. The main driver of this decline is some initial on-boarding costs we've experienced associated with new client additions for our social security advocacy business. We expect margins to increase back to historical levels over the next few quarters. Onto slide 12, in the second quarter of 2014, we provided ranges of where we expected Wright to perform in its first fiscal year, which is Q3 of 2014 through the second quarter of 2015. We're pleased with the year-one performance of Wright. We delivered revenues very close to our estimates and earnings per share in line with our estimates even without material weather-related events to drive incremental revenues. As we mentioned in 2014, the original forecast included $7.5 million of revenues for weather events. For reference, this was based upon the 10-year average, but excluded Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. In the first year, we only realized about $1 million of cat revenue for Wright. While the cat revenues were down from projections, the team has done an excellent job of managing their cost. We're also pleased with the performance of our National Schools program, our new National Municipal program and our Food program. In summary, we're very pleased with the financial and operational performance and trajectory of the business. We'd like to thank the entire Wright team for their efforts over the last year in producing solid results. With that, let me turn it back over to Powell for closing comments. J. Powell Brown - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you, Andy, for great report. In summary, two of our divisions had a good quarter and the other two divisions were below our expectations. However, we can see they are driving the right activities to deliver long-term organic growth and profitability. We remain actively engaged in discussions with many acquisition candidates. And as I've mentioned before, closing an acquisition depends on when the seller is ready and if we can come to an appropriate financial transaction. I can tell you that we continue to be active in this space, but are being prudent and disciplined as pricing and terms continue to be aggressive. Lastly, our disciplined capital deployment strategy across internal investments, acquisitions and returns to shareholders remains a key focus to help us drive long-term shareholder value. In closing, we have some challenges and some opportunities and we're going to meet and seize them. We're energized about the trajectory of where we see growth in our incremental investments and new teammates will position us well for revenue growth and margin expansion in the future. Now, I'd like to turn it back to Tracy for the Q&A section, and if you could just explain the process to everyone on the call.